Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  “Oh!” she cries. “Thank you for saying that, sweetheart. Thank you.”

  She closes her eyes. Her hand relaxes, continuing to make restless movements in his for a while, and then eventually she goes back to sleep.

  At the nurses’ station, they’re reassured that Mrs. Closs is stable and that the doctor will call if there’s any change. They walk together to the parking lot.

  “You wanna come over to my place before you head back?” Gaelan asks. “I could cook some eggs or something if you’re hungry.”

  Bethan looks at her watch. “Well, they’re all asleep, so … Yeah, sure. I could use some coffee.”

  “You wanna go in one car?”

  Her brow furrows; a sudden muscular tic causes her eyelids to quiver. She starts blinking furiously. “No,” she answers, looking away from him. “That’s okay.” After squeezing her eyes shut for a moment, she retrieves a prescription pad and pencil from her purse. When she looks at him again, her gaze is unperturbed. “What’s the address?”

  She assays the condo without comment, deposits her coat and purse on the sofa, and then excuses herself to the bathroom. Gaelan busies himself in the kitchen, hoping to discover something suitable to serve to a guest at four in the morning. He’s not hopeful. For weeks (actually, months) there’s been no one but him and the cats in residence, day or night, so mostly he’s been eating out. The fridge contents are pathetically spare and dismal: a couple of naval oranges, an oily carton of take-out fettucini, a saucepan of leftover oatmeal, a couple of hard-boiled eggs, a jar of capers, and some hummus that’s gone green around the edges. There might be some rice cakes in the cupboard. Low-fat refried beans. Something canned from Healthy Choice.

  At least there’s alcohol.

  “Beer or wine?” he shouts.

  “Just coffee if you have it,” she shouts back. “Instant is fine. I should probably get going pretty soon.”

  He could put on a CD, but he’s embarrassed to; his collection is still dominated by the music of their youth—1980s vintage Springsteen mostly—and he realizes how sad that is, how telling. Surely Bethan’s musical tastes have advanced into the twenty-first century, if for no other reason than that she has a kid—although Eli doesn’t strike him as the kind of boy who’s on the cultural cutting edge. To listen with Bethan to any other music but Springsteen feels wrong; but to do that might seem like trying to get something back. After all, they’re different people now, aren’t they? It would feel desperate. Even turning on the radio seems trivial somehow, sullying.

  Gaelan experiences a sorrowful realization: It will never be possible to sit in a room with Bethan Ellis and converse casually to a score of background music.

  “Thanks,” she says, emerging from the bathroom and receiving her coffee. She must have washed her face (dampened wisps of hair are clinging to her forehead) and cleaned her eyeglasses; they are now smudge-free.

  He sits on the sofa; she doesn’t. This makes him nervous.

  She ambles through the corner of the room where he keeps his work-out equipment. “Scene of the crime, then,” she mutters.

  How is he to respond to this? He makes a show of shifting his weight on the sofa, pretending not to have heard her.

  “You going somewhere?” she asks offhandedly.

  “What? Oh …” He shrugs out of the right half of his coat, then unpeels the left sleeve to his wrist but finds he can’t extricate his arm. So he sits there, a one-armed man half-encased in an eiderdown jacket.

  She seems to be studying the digital readout on his treadmill when she says, “I can’t decide if we have too much to talk about or too little.”

  Do we have to talk at all? he wonders. Maybe he should put on some music.

  “How long have you lived here?” she adds, thankfully, as if this segue to idle chitchat is perfectly natural.

  “Let’s see … fifteen years, maybe? No, sixteen.”

  She looks at him. “So right after you graduated, then?”

  “Pretty much, yeah. Right after I got the job at the station.”

  She nods. “You’ve done well.”

  Kate and Spencer come out, mewling and posing. She pets them, makes purring noises. They succumb to her touch with sluttish abandon, swooning to their sides, stretching, yawning, exposing their bellies. She always was good with animals.

  “I’ve had sex with a lot of women,” Gaelan blurts.

  She gives him a puzzled look. “Yes? So? Why wouldn’t you?”

  This is not the reaction he expected. Judgment, yes; a blasé acceptance, never. “I just thought you should know.”

  “Why?” She shrugs. “It’s none of my business.”

  She plops down on the sofa, as far from him as possible. Still, she could have chosen the chair. Kate and Spencer join them.

  Bethan continues to assess the room in a studious manner, squinting intently at the white ceiling and beige walls as if determining how best to restore the ancient frescoes beneath.

  “Tell me about your husband,” Gaelan says. “If you want to.”

  “Not now. Tell me why you never got married.”

  She probably thinks this is a difficult subject, but it’s not. “I’ve just never met the right person.”

  “That’s a pretty stock answer,” she remarks.

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “I slept with a lot of people, too, after we broke up,” she announces, her voice determinedly sanguine. “Revenge fucking, I think they call it. I didn’t enjoy it much.”

  “Sorry.”

  She looks at him, waits.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeats, giving weight to the words, certain that, at this moment anyway, their inner monologues are roughly aligned. “Can you forgive me?”

  Her silence—not an unresponsive silence, but one that is dense and somehow palpably connected to his words—reminds him of something else he’s always loved, and missed, about her: the way she makes no effort to answer questions that are unanswerable.

  “It’s too bad, what happened to us,” she says finally, “and I thought I’d never get over it. But I did. I have.” She abruptly extracts a thick, folded sheaf of papers from her purse and snaps them open. He’s revisited by that sharp upsurging feeling in his chest; she has the resolved look of someone who’s about to deliver a prepared, villifying indictment of his sins and transgressions.

  Instead, she launches into a description of the subscapularis, supraspinatus, infraspinatus, and teres minor, followed by a lecture on rotator cuff injuries.

  “This is some information I printed up for you about shoulder injuries in general,” she concludes. “Treatment protocols, physical therapy, self-care measures … Here.”

  “Thanks.” Gaelan notes with amusement that the front page of this prospectus is a page from The Anatomy Coloring Book. He wonders if the next thing out of her purse will be a box of Crayolas.

  “Read that,” she insists, “so I can answer any questions before I leave. I want to show you some of the exercises. Do you have any ice packs?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She gets up. “How about frozen vegetables?”

  “Maybe.” He remains on the sofa reading while she goes into the kitchen. There’s a lot in here that concerns him, specifically the part about how he’s supposed to stop heavy lifting and/or overhead activity and how physical therapy may take from three weeks to several months.

  He gets up and joins her. “It says here that steroid injections can also be used to relieve the pain.”

  “That’s one treatment option.”

  “So?”

  She helps him take off the rest of his coat. “I don’t recommend that for you.”

  “I can get used to needles,” he says, unconvincingly, even to himself.

  “That’s not the reason.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because steroidal injections can give you a false sense of confidence. If you’re not experiencing some degree of pain you’re more likely to do something
stupid. Overdo. Reinjure. Bodybuilders are notoriously reckless that way. I’ve seen it over and over again. Now stand here. I’m going to help you take this off.”

  He complies. Reaching inside his sweater, she presses his shoulder so that it’s stabilized against the surface of the fridge. He’d forgotten the feeling in her hands; how she really is gifted with a healer’s touch.

  “Why did you become a radiologist?” he asks.

  She frowns.

  “This might hurt,” she says. “Breathe.” She starts easing his left arm out of the sweater. It only hurts a little.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  She takes the papers out of his hand and pulls his other arm out of the sleeve. His head is now the only part of him still extruding. He feels like an incapable toddler.

  But as she starts gathering up the sweater, slowly, carefully, taking it over his head—the moment is a defining example of déjà vu—he registers the proximity of their bodies—it is a very small kitchen—and after months of success at playing dead, his penis finally comes out of svasana.

  In the brief second when she’s left standing with her arms extended overhead, focus directed upward, he reaches around her waist and pulls her body close. She looks surprised, but unafraid, willing.

  He does not want to remember the exact circumstances of their last kiss, but he knows that it has been sixteen years since he encountered this mouth, these lips, this tongue—his first mouth, and the only one he knew from the time he was fourteen years old until he was twenty-two.

  Time begins to rewind, and it is that last kiss, not the sad, guilty, perfunctory kiss he surely gave her on the church steps that Christmas Eve right before they broke up, but another: the kiss at the airport on the day she flew away to med school, their cheeks wet, their mouths full of salt; it is a kiss on the corner of Tenth and G on a wintry Saturday morning outside Klein’s bakery, lips dusted with confectioners’ sugar, holding paper cups of steaming black coffee and a bag of pastries—the nice German ladies loved them so, they used to give them strudel right out of the oven for free; it is the kiss on the state Capitol steps in spring as busloads of children streamed by, pointing and teasing; on a secluded grassy spot in Pioneer Park before they were rousted by a cop; in the middle of his family’s field, or hers, hidden among the corn rows; it is many kisses in his car, making out while Bruce sings about a barefoot girls sitting on the hood of a Dodge, drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain; it is prom night, in front of his sisters, who keep making them kiss for the camera; it is their first kiss under the old railroad bridge over the ravine where they used to meet: They were twelve and fourteen and he was so worried about her braces but she said afterward that it didn’t hurt at all.

  After a while, she eases away and pivots within the circle of his arms so that her back is to him.

  “Stay the night,” he says.

  “I don’t know if I can, Gae.”

  “Why not?”

  “I still miss my husband.” She tilts her head upward and emits a heavy, ragged exhale; he knows that she’s trying not to cry. “It’s so funny, for a long time I slept with people because I missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too,” he says, and not just because that response forms the next logical stepping-stone to the bedroom, but because it’s the truth. He enfolds her with his right arm and draws her into his good side, resting his chin lightly on the top of her head. He feels her body relax.

  “There’s a gesture,” she says, “something you did, long ago, when we were kids, after we moved to Lincoln and I showed you the kitchen of my apartment for the first time. Those sky blue cupboards in the kitchen, the yellow linoleum. Do you remember?”

  That word, how he fears it sometimes.

  “I loved that kitchen,” Bethan goes on. “That’s really why I took that apartment, I think, for that kitchen. So bright and happy. I was so nervous, the first time you came over, and I think you were, too, you were so quiet, so serious. Looking at everything, making sure it was sound, I guess, and safe, or something. The leaky sink, the pilot light … Remember?”

  He does.

  “I wanted so badly for you to like it because it was where we were going to, you know, surrender up our virginities, and I started opening and closing drawers and cupboards in that foolish, compulsive way people do, even when they know there’s nothing inside. The cupboards had been painted and repainted so many times that they were hard to open and one of them—way up high—was stuck. I struggled with it for awhile, and then you came up behind me and reached around me and opened it.”

  He doesn’t recall this, and yet, because their bodies are aligned in just the way she’s describing, he starts to create the memory, imprint the image in a way that will allow him to speak of it from this moment on as something that he, too, remembers.

  “We just stood there,” she says, her voice high, young, “not touching, looking into that empty cupboard. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed about that moment, that gesture, especially since Leo died. For the longest time I didn’t know why, but now I think I do.”

  She is crying now. He turns her around so that they’re face-to-face again.

  “It’s such a simple dream, really,” she says, “just a replay of that moment without its sexual heat. But it’s so powerful, the feeling it gives me. The comfort. I’ve wanted to thank you for it, that’s all.”

  He smooths away her tears, takes her hand, and starts leading her out of the kitchen. “Come to bed,” he says. “Sleep with me.”

  “I told you, I don’t know if it’s right. I still miss my husband.”

  He smiles. “I don’t mind being a stand-in.” He means it as a tease, but a worried look comes over her face.

  “You should mind,” she says emphatically. “How can you say that? You should never be a stand-in. Not for anyone. Not ever.” Her tone is insistent, even angry. And then her face unfolds into a look of terrible realization. “Is that how it’s been for you, Gae?”

  He ignores the question. “Be with me.” He is pulling her lightly by the hand, backing down the hall toward the bedroom.

  She doesn’t resist. But when they reach the door to the bedroom, her expression reflects a sudden shock.

  “What? What is it?” he says, alarmed, turning around.

  There’s nothing. Just the bed.

  “That quilt,” she says, her face astonished, and he realizes that she is one of the only people in the world who knows it to be a replica. “That can’t be the one your mom made … How?”

  “I paid a fabric artist to make it.”

  She’s still scowling. “It’s extraordinary.” Her voice is expressionless.

  “What?” he asks.

  “Why is it in here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You could have put it somewhere else.”

  “It’s a quilt. It belongs on a bed.”

  She looks at him. All the softness is gone from her face. “It’s more than that, Gae. Don’t pretend that it isn’t. You could have”—she gestures vaguely—“hung it on a wall or something.”

  “I didn’t want it on a wall,” he says, angered. Why is she making such a big deal about this? “I wanted it …”

  “Yes?”

  “I wanted it to be …” She stares at him, and her eyes become projection screens on which he watches all the encounters with all women he’s had in this room over the years: same scene, same dialogue, different actresses, one long screen test.

  He sees her make all the mental connections between the quilt—the ultimate trump card—and his sex life, the way he’s traded on his family story, exploiting the quilt’s beauty.

  “How sad they must all feel,” Bethan remarks, “the women who come into this room, when you tell them that your mother is dead.”

  She waits, but when he doesn’t speak, she lowers her gaze and nods her head—as if his silence confirms some sorry truth she was hoping to disprove.


  “I can’t, Gae,” she says finally. “I have to go.”

  She leaves behind a used coffee cup. There’s not even an imprint of lipstick on its rim. He pulls the quilt off the bed and stuffs it into the closet. He pours a beer, puts on the Nebraska album, sits on the sofa, and closes his eyes.

  In his mind he plays another movie—one of the two of them when they were young. There’s nothing sad about that movie or the characters in it. The future hasn’t happened yet. They haven’t made any choice but the choice to be in love for the first time and with each other.

  Hope’s Diary, 1970:

  Hide-and-Seek

  I’m thinking about things that are hidden: in the back of the closet, in the back of the drawer, under the stairs, behind the door, up in the attic, down in the basement, deep in the earth, in plain sight. That which is hidden acquires power, the size and scope of its power in direct proportion to the time elapsed.

  How can human remains stay hidden for so long? I’m talking about the missing-in-action in Vietnam (thank God Viney was at least spared that horror), the mammoth skeleton found in its totality by a family wandering the Siberian plains in the dead of winter, murder victims, the hellish game of hide-and-seek that police detectives must engage in. How is it possible? How can things stay hidden for so long?

  What is hidden has power—but where is the power lodged?

  In Emlyn Springs, we hide the mirrors in times of grief.

  We hide our faces in moments of shame.

  We hide our children from things too awful to take in with the eyes.

  We hide from the reality of death, if we can.

  If what is hidden acquires power, then revealing it should rob it of its power.

  Come out, come out, wherever you are.

  After reading “Farenheit 451,” I wondered where I’d hide the books when the Thought Police came to burn them. And after reading the diary of Anne Frank, I wondered where would I have hidden the Jews? Would Anne and her family have survived in my house?

  Things, objects hide from me; I know this without a doubt. And then they reappear, having had their secret adventures. They reinsert themselves into the landscape of my desk, my dresser drawer.